Introduction The exponential growth of data across the financial services environment is providing both numerous opportunities and numerous challenges for established Financial Services Industry (FSI) businesses, including challenges for traditional approaches and IT infrastructure. The financial services space is underpinned by a huge number of transactions of many kinds, with research estimating that, worldwide, non-cash B2B transactions will increase to 200billion per year by 2025 from 121.5billion in 2021 . These transactions generate data. It is estimated that 1.7 MB of data is created every second for every person worldwide2 , and a considerable proportion of data generated and collected by organizations is unstructured (with the global datasphere estimated to be 80% unstructured data by 20253 ). With the wider adoption of digitalization ongoing, and data being generated in more locations in a wide range of formats, organizations are facing the reality of needing to collect, collate, clean and format fragmented data before they can even begin to drive value and insight from it. Hybrid Cloud solutions are increasingly providing FSI organizations with the flexibility to store and manage this data according to their specific needs and requirements.

The amount of data that exists across all parts of the FSI ecosystem offers opportunities to improve risk management and drive operational efficiency. FSI organizations are shifting towards Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) in order to better leverage this data in privacy-centric and fully compliant ways. Traditionally, this has been done using on-premises based solutions. However, these solutions have increasingly caused challenges, including cost of operation and ongoing upgrades combined with technology debt, and less scalable deployment models.

Across the FSI space we are seeing a shift towards hybrid, flexible approaches that give users access to all the power of public Cloud without giving up control of the data centre, which is vital in privacy-centric financial organizations.

This shift is illustrated by IDC research, which predicts that by the end of 2022 over 90% of enterprises worldwide will be relying on an infrastructure mix of on-premises private Clouds, public Clouds, and legacy platforms to meet their infrastructure needs.